Month: February 2020

The Project Management Plan – Communications Management

Professor of Project Management Project Planning

Planning

Managing communications on a project is one of the top real-world challenges, right up there with the battle for resources. Project crises are frequently created by miscommunication or lack of communication.

Communications must be managed on many levels:

  • Communicating up to Executives and the Project Steering Committee
  • Communicating sideways to your management peers
  • Communicating down to the project team members (note the “up”, “sideways” and “down” designations refer to the typical project hierarchy chart and are not meant to be derogatory)
  • Managing the lines of communication. There are potentially n(n-1)/2 lines where n = the number of people involved in the project. For example, a project with 10 people has 45 potential lines of communication!

Knowing how to tailor your communications to each audience is an important skill. Executive communication is typically brief and bottom-line (are we on schedule and budget? Do we have critical issues? How are high-exposure risks being managed?). Communication to management peers usually will include important project metrics (schedule, budget, scope, resources, issues, risks, task plans). Communications to project team members is focused on near-term task planning and upcoming milestones.

The Communications Management Plan specifically addresses the following:

  • Identifies all of the stakeholders and determines their information and communications needs
  • Identifies how and when the information will be distributed, including status reporting, progress measurement, and forecasting
  • Identifies how stakeholders will be managed to satisfy their requirements and resolve issues. This includes defining the lines of communication and the mechanism for issue logging and visibility
  • Identifies the project document repository and the folder names

The Project Management Plan – Staff Management

Professor of Project Management Project Planning

Planning

Staff management planning is important to prevent or minimize the battle for resources, which is the number one problem for most Project Managers. The Staff Management section of the Project Management Plan addresses the following:

• Identifies project roles, responsibilities, and reporting relationships

• Describes how the project team will be formed, developed, and managed. This includes procedures on releasing and adding team members

Identification of roles can occur even before you know the specific names that will fill those roles. It is based on the parameters and demands of the project. Examples of roles are “Executive Sponsor”, “Project Manager”, “Business Analyst”, “Tester”, “Contract Reviewer”, etc.

Defining the responsibilities of each role is important to minimize the chance of two unwanted outcomes: (1) two or more people are duplicating effort because they all think they own it; (2) key responsibilities are not taken on by anyone because they think it is owned by someone else.

Defining the reporting relationships is important as you will need to know who to go to for permissions and escalations.

Understanding how the project team will be formed is important to make sure you will have the roles filled on time, for the time needed, and with the skill sets required to meet the schedule.

The Project Manager also has a responsibility to develop the project team members soft and hard skills so they become more valuable to the organization and increase their personal job satisfaction. This development can take many forms. It can be formal training, coaching or show by example. You can discuss who will be targeted for development with the managers of the project team members and define what form it will take.

The Project Management Plan – Cost Management

Professor of Project Management Project Planning ,

Planning

Depending on the organization you work for and the project you are working on, the Project Manager may or may not be managing the project budget and costs. If you are tasked to do this, include Cost Management as part of your Project Management Plan.

The Cost Management Plan addresses the following:

• Defines what resources (human, hardware, software, services, facilities) will be considered part of the project costs and when it will be base-lined

• Defines how costs will be reported and who will approve invoices and internal costs

• Defines the magnitude of cost changes that will be subject to formal change management

• Includes a plan for change management: How change is requested, authorized, and documented

• Reference the Project Charter for the priority of Cost in the triple constraints

If cost is the highest priority in your project triple constraints, Cost Management becomes a critical activity. You want to not only record and track costs that have already been incurred, but you also must do new cost projections on a regular basis. As more is known about a project, cost projections will become more accurate.

A former manager of mine once told me that if your costs incurred + future projected costs exactly equals your budget, then you are not doing accurate cost projections. This is based purely on the laws of probability. The probability of your actual and projected costs EXACTLY matching a budget created before the project began is very low.

The Project Management Plan – Schedule Management

Professor of Project Management Project Planning ,

Planning

Before I dive into Schedule Management I want to note the difference between the schedule and what many refer to as “the project plan”. You will often hear the Microsoft Project artifact referred to as “the project plan”. In reality, it is only the project schedule. The Project Plan is the combination of the Project Management Plan (being discussed in this series of posts),  the Project Activity Plan (or Work Breakdown), which will be discussed in future posts, and the Project Schedule. I encourage you to use this terminology correctly.

The Schedule Management Plan addresses the following:

• Indicates how the project schedule will be created (who will be the sources of start/end dates and effort), when it will be base lined and lists any scheduling constraints

• Describes the implementation approach (phased, iterative, pilot, etc)

• Defines what level of the schedule will be subject to change management (typically these are the high level milestones and major phase start/end; all other changes can be informally negotiated)

• Defines how schedule performance is monitored and reported (e.g., variance analysis)

• Defines the project schedule software to be used

• Includes a plan for change management: How a schedule change is requested, authorized, and documented

• Reference the Project Charter for the priority of Schedule in the triple constraints

Schedule Management is a critical part of project management and communication. In future posts I will show how to construct the schedule and monitor performance.